Iain Martin is a political commentator, and a former editor of The Scotsman and former deputy editor of The Sunday Telegraph. He is the author of Making It Happen: Fred Goodwin, RBS and the men who blew up the British economy, published by Simon & Schuster.. As well as this blog, he writes a column for The Sunday Telegraph. You can read more about Iain by visiting his website

The Rolling Stones were terrible at Hyde Park in 1969. They'll be much better this time

The Stones are returning to Hyde Park this summer. The concert is part of their 50th anniversary tour (“50 years and Counting”: do you see what they did there?). In advance of their appearance there will be the usual jokes and mockery. Five decades ago, entry to the gig was free. Now it is not. The tickets will be ridiculously expensive and the sponsor is a credit card company. Look how corporate they have become, and so on. Ho hum.

On the first of many occasions when I saw the band play live it seemed at the time as though it was my generation’s last chance to catch the Stones before they went to the giant Crawdaddy Club in the sky. Surely, with the amount of heroin, Jack Daniel's and shepherd’s pie that Keith Richards had consumed it would not be long before the “human riff” checked out? That was in 1990. On that tour Mick Jagger was – my goodness, the horror! – 47 years old. Twenty-three years later they are still at it.

Having been around for so long the Stones have become expert at manipulating their own myth and exploiting media gulliblity. Inevitably, the news bulletins today will carry footage of them on stage in 1969, and perhaps an interview with some old hippy saying that he was there and, oh man, he can’t really remember it (which is supposed to indicate stoned authenticity) but Mick and Keith really rocked the joint and it was beautiful, a real coming together and an expression of the spirit of sixties.

Utter balls, I'm afraid. The truth is that the Stones were dire at Hyde Park in 1969. Watch the film of the day if you don’t believe me. They were under-rehearsed and quite possibly nervous, not having performed live in front of an audience in more than two years. The guitars were badly out of tune and half the songs were approached at the wrong tempo. There was a mad intensity to Jagger’s performance which appeared, judging by the film of the occasion, to be him trying to cover up for the shortcomings of his bandmates.

The day didn’t run according to the script. The Stones hoped to commemorate Brian Jones, who had died just two days before, after he was fired and replaced with the young Mick Taylor. When the band released thousands of white butterflies intending them to flutter away above the heads of the hundreds of thousands of spectators at Hyde Park, half of the butterflies fell to the stage dead. The roadies had forgotten to put air holes in the boxes and the creatures had died in transit.

By that day London had long since stopped “swinging”, but as a metaphor for the end of an era – a full stop at the end of the 60s – the dead butterflies were only bettered by what happened five months later during another Stones free concert. At Altamont in California in December 1969 a member of the audience was stabbed to death by Hells Angels hired by the Stones to provide “security”.

The day of the Hyde Park gig there was what sounds like a much better concert, a double bill of The Who and Chuck Berry that evening at the Albert Hall. On the night, veterans of the Mods v Rockers battles of the mid-1960s revived their emnity by skirmishing in the aisles.

One of the remarkable aspects of that tumultuous period is that the end of the 1960s did not break the Stones as it broke the Beatles. Jagger and Richards had been bested in the second half of the Sixties by Lennon and McCartney, when their superior craftsmanship and skills in the studio won out. But the Stones did not implode. In the end Jagger and Richards were tougher and more streetwise than Lennon and McCartney. Neither was likely to fall for a Japanese conceptual artist.

By the time of Hyde Park the Stones were in the early stages of really getting their act together, a process which started with the recording of Jumping Jack Flash in 1968 and developed with the Beggars Banquet album. From there they grew steadily stronger, despite the lame showing at Hyde Park and the disaster of Altamont. An extraordinary creative outpouring resulted in Let It Bleed, Sticky Fingers and Exile on Mainstreet, peerless albums that fused pop, blues, rock’n’roll, country, gospel and soul. By the autumn of 1969 they had learned anew how to play live and after Exile in 1972 they were flying, floating, playing at the absolute top of their game in a manner that has never been bettered.

But the reconstituted version of the Stones with Ronnie Wood (originally a member of the Faces and a tremendous guitarist) has more than done justice, in concert at least, to the band’s great body of work. They really do sound much better playing live now than they did at Hyde Park in 1969.